Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

My maternal grandmother had a Maytag wringer, (originally gasoline-engined, but converted to electric). We spent a summer with her when I was six. Once when the Maytag blinked, we washed in her identical pot and wrung by hand. I remember adding "bluing" to the rinse to de-yellow the whites. She was a little more fashionable than this woman. But my paternal grandmother, who lived for some years in Arkansas, was not. I had to look twice to make sure this wasn't her. I can't say definitively not.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.